Run-In Quotation

A run-in quotation — sometimes called an in-text or inline quotation — is a quotation short enough to be woven into the writer's own sentence and enclosed in quotation marks. It contrasts with the block quotation, which is set off as an indented paragraph without quotation marks. The choice between the two forms is largely a matter of length: most style guides use a threshold — four typed lines in MLA, five in Chicago's author-date style, forty words in APA — above which a quotation should be blocked and below which it should run in.

Run-in quotations do more than save space. They let the writer take grammatical responsibility for the borrowed material: the quotation becomes a constituent of the writer's sentence, subject to the writer's syntax, and the argument can move through it without breaking stride. Block quotations, by their visual separateness, cede that responsibility — the reader is invited to pause and read the source on its own terms.

Because a run-in quotation is grammatically embedded, small adjustments — bracketed capitalisation changes, bracketed additions to make pronouns clear, ellipses to skip subordinate clauses — are often needed to make it fit. Every such adjustment must be marked; unmarked edits inside quotation marks are misquotation.

Common mistake: running in a quotation that is too long. Once the borrowed material exceeds two or three lines of the writer's own prose, the eye stops treating it as part of the sentence, the quotation marks become visual clutter, and both writer and reader are better served by a block.